DWi-P supports the pedestrian life of Lower Manhattan through sound and movement. DWi-P offers the sound of WaTER, supported by stairs, walkways, and ramps through a transparent community building that welcomes Lower Manhattan visitors to Battery Park City. Sound and a green roof permeated by stairs, ramps and walkways, link the Battery Park City Ballfields to North End Avenue through DWi-P’s WaTER façade: a unique digital artwork, activated through cellphone technologies.

DWi-P’s façade makes an edge to the Murray-Warren Passage, a new parkway link between Murray and Warren Streets. Visitors to DWi-P can walk along the Passage, adjacent to the inscribed score, or move up through the building, using exterior stairs and ramps built into the facade. hMa Principal Meyers catalogs DWi-P and hMa’s collaboration with composer M.J. Schumacher in her recently published book, Shape of Sound (May 2014, Artifice Books London).

DWi-P’s internal program continues the theme of water: the pool room and swim program are the principal program areas in the building. DWi-P is operated by Asphalt Green, an organization that specializes in teaching swimming. Graduates of the program have participated with U.S. Olympic Swim Teams. The program includes visits by previous Olympic team members.

Won Buddhist Retreat is another hMa project with Sound and Movement as part of an overall architectural program. The Won Buddhist Retreat emphasizes sound through a program where sound is programmed. The meditation hall is programmed for silence; other areas are designated for conversation.

At Won Buddhist Retreat, programmed movement is determined through walking paths, courtyards, and shaped roofs. Walking paths include predetermined paths through residential and public courtyards, for silent meditation; and nature paths through meadows, from the residential areas to the public domain of meditation hall and visitor’s center.

03/29/2015

Above: section - perspective through the facade of DWi-P: Digital Water i-Pavilion, by hMa. DWi-P takes on overtones of movement, thought, and time, and contemporary cell phone technologies.

Above: The facade of DWi-P. DWi-P: invisible buildings disappear as landscape; disappear as sound. DWi-P is Platinum LEED certified and located in Battery Park City's North Neighborhood. hMa are the designers for DWi-P and the North Neighborhood Master Plan.

Above: Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, possibly the most famous work of art in the 20th Century. This piece by Duchamp suggests ideas about time, movement, space, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as well as a possible parable about male and female sexuality. Duchamp's painting presents thin metal forms captured between two panes of glass, within an ordinary, off-the-shelf, metal frame window.

Above: View from inside hMa's DWi-P. The Frit pattern on the wall is also a sound piece by New York composer, Michael J. Schumacher.

Above: DWi-P: a building, or a landscape behind glass. Is it simply sound? Is it water?

Above: DWi-P captures a human figure on the Murray Street ramp. At DWi-P, figures move through space with the secondary overlay of the Schumacher score. The score can be heard, through a cell-phone App.

Above: The delamination of DWi-P, at the southern end of the building, including the Passage that passes in front of the building. Layers of movement are captured within and through DWi-P's glass wall.

Above: hMa's study for the massing of the North Neighborhood. This study also depicts the 'sound field' reach of the DWi-P App. The area where visitors can hear the Schumacher score: WaTER.

This is not unlike the Duchamp Roto-Relief project: an exercise in understanding sound as form.

Above: the Entry Level plan for DWi-P. The Entry to the building is the only room that rises above the level of the roof. The roof is a Battery Park City park.

Above: 'Playing' the facade at DWi-P; to the right: a screen shot of the DWi-P App.

Above: two more screen shots of the DWi-P App.

Above: Screen-shots.

Above: View of Entry to DWi-P's Ballfield Terrace Park.

Above: View of the olympic-size pool from the entry : the main program for the Center is swimming, or Water.

Above: View of the pool and the Entry.

Above: the main level plan - reached by 'descending' - a staircase.

Above: comparison of two main stairs at DWi-P, designed to capture the act of 'Descending' from one space to another.

above: hMa : movement of the body through space.

Above: Main stair, inside DWi-P.

Above: Main Corridor along the glass wall, inside DWi-P.

Above: Olympic size pool : human movement through water.

Above: one of three ramps at DWi-P, from the Dance Studio: human movement.

Above: children play along the exterior ramp in front of DWi-P.

Above: Invisibility: the transparency of DWi-P's glass facade.

Above: Cevdet Erek - There. From the show 'Tactics of Invisibility' ; co-curated by Daniela Zyman and Emre Baykal. The show is co-produced by the Vehbi Koc Foundation, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Erek's installation touches on the idea of invisibility.

Above: DWi-P at night: human movement inside and outside in the Passage.

Above: DWi-P : view to the World Trade Memorial Site, across West Street. Left: view of one of the fountains at the Memorial Site: both projects feature water.

03/18/2015

Architecture itself Is education and references ideas by its existence. For education, we present work by hMa Principal Victoria Meyers' students at the University of Cincinnati. Above: Images from Meyers' Seminar, 'Sound Urbanism/ Sound Ecology', at the University of Cincinnati. Meyers' seminar spent Spring 2014 ‘mapping’ sound sections through significant neighborhoods in Cincinnati.

Above, top of the image: student drawing of the Bridge over the Ohio River, separating Ohio and Kentucky. This is an area of intense industrial activity and shipping. Below, left side of the drawing: the Viaduct that crosses train tracks that lead to the main train station in downtown Cincinnati. When the Mid-West was a center of industrial manufacturing, there were hundreds of trains /day passing below this viaduct. Today there are a few trains/ day, and the train station is a museum. The sounds generated by trains coming through Cincinnati are different than they were 100 years ago.

In addition to drawings, students also made sound recordings of each section. The goal was to generate sections that explore visually and through sound, areas that register significant change to Cincinnati.

Above: Meyers' 2012 Graduate Studio at the University of Texas: Manhattanville M(w)EE. Students were asked to design a new Subway Station for the 125th Street Subway Stop in Manhattan. This is an area where the NYC Subway is elevated above ground. 125th Street is the lowest elevation in NYC.

This has become a significant stop on the # 1 Train because Columbia University is building a new Campus here. Students were asked to design a subway stop capable of handling 10,000 people /day. Each Student also developed a program to go with their stops.

We show two projects: one imagines a new Bio-Engineering Lab as a linear bridge over the elevated subway. The other project is a translucent Cube - an arts building - that hovers around the stop, with the subway passing through the base.

Meyers' Spring 2014 Studio, above. Meyers asked students to design a ‘Hacker-Maker’ building in downtown Brooklyn. The studio concentrated on the design of roofs, and open spaces for working.

The project from Meyers studio above, has a roof with fractal openings, where crystalline shaped skylights drop through the roof into the Hacker-Maker space. Hacker-Makers get randomly placed cubes to work in. The interface between two systems of form: the formalism of cubes and rectilinear space, juxtaposed to fractals and crystalline forms - creates a dynamic space for creative work.

Research is how we test our environment. It is ultimately - how human cultures grow. We are showing, above, hMa’s project - DWi-P - opened in 2014. DWi-P is a building that presents a complex overlay of Sound Composition / Glass// and Cell Phone Technology. DWi-P's glass Wall has a score etched on it, is embedded with Bluetooth, and has an App. The DWi-P App will read where visitors are in space, and visitors can point cell phones at the wall, and play the Schumacher composition, WaTER, etched on the glass as a frit pattern.

The image above shows Dr. Lene Hau, at Harvard. Dr. Hau is a Physicist doing research on the speed of light at Harvard. In 2006 hMa Principal Meyers wrote ‘Designing with Light’. For research on DWL, Meyers had several conversations with Dr. Hau.

hMa continued our conversations, and Dr. Hau had great influence on how hMa designed Infinity Chapel.

03/16/2015

The title of my Talk : Silence, Lines, Woven Operations, and Fractals. These are operations that make architecture.Lines and fractals speak to mathematics. Mathematics is basic to Architecture. In the Medieval Era, Architects participated in guilds. Guilds passed knowledge about building, based on sacred geometries, from generation to generation. They used knowledge about geometry and stone to build structures – Cathedrals - that we would be unable to build as stone-masonry today.

Silence and Woven Operations - speak to my Philosophical position of design. I prefer to be ‘Silent’, but thoughtful, in my use of materials, mathematics, and form.I foster ‘silence’ in my work by using ‘woven operations’ to make buildings that blend into environments.

SEMPER: In order to achieve Mathematical and philosophical Goals as architects hMa uses a series of Tools: I am presenting 6 Tools, represented by the letters : S E M P E R.

- By creating open conversations through concrete tube connectors between floors - at Infinity Chapel.

Education – Architecture is ‘Education’. Medieval cathedrals were historical chronicles of towns where they were built. Contemporary architecture is, likewise, a chronicle of modern life.

Research - In a fast changing world - it requires constant research for architects to maintain a relevant Practice.

I want to go into Greater Detail about Each of these Operations

Infinity Chapel - Geometrically formed series of surfaces designed to frame light. The surfaces reference an idea about the 4th Dimension (time) through ts form (hyper-cube), and through the movement of daylight. The Chapel is a series of spherical shapes set within a rectangular building envelop.

The Chapel design includes ‘Sound and Light Wells’ - concrete boxes - that connect a street-level Chapel and Reading Room to a Basement Sunday School below. They also mark a path - from MacDougal Street, through a Reading Room, to the Chapel.

‘Sound and light wells’ cut through the floor of the building, and connect the entire compound visually, and through sound.

In contrast to the Dynamic nature of Infinity Chapel hMa’s Won Buddhist Meditation Hall is designed for stillness, underlined by Silence. The Won Buddhists requested a program of Silence for a simple rectangular building for Meditation.

On the same site, hMa designed four dynamic buildings with fractal roofs where architecture uses the dynamism of fractal form to sponsor walking meditation through landscape.

‘Systems’ – can include Game Theory. Games sponsor movement.

This shows John Cage a Composer, and Marcel Duchamp, a Visual Artist, possibly the two most important Artists of the 20th Century - playing chess. Duchamp and Cage saw Chess as a way of understanding the world through an aesthetic system – a series of decisions related to program - governed by the cartesian grid –

Chess, like architecture, demands that whoever plays has the ability to calculate the ramifications of movement through space, several steps ahead. I love the work of Duchamp also because I love his concept of ‘Infrathin’, and its application to Space and Spatial systems of Design. I love Cage’s sound creations - a body of work based on a counter-point to the idea of ‘Silence’.

These 2 concepts – Infrathin - or Infinitely thin space;and Silence - have reverberated through my work as an architect.

Contemporary artists use systems to generate algorithmic interpretations of materials and space. At MIT, Skylar Tibbitts and his SJET Lab - create self-Assembling- programmable objects with the potential to redefine our concept of sculpture, materials, and construction. Tibbits is stretching the limits of art and space - to include infinite variations of program and materiality through his application of mobility and movement to materials

This is a Project I will return to in Greater Detail: ‘Contains Real Hard Won Insight’ - a Text-based Sculpture to be built out of laser-cut steel and a collaboration between hMa and Bruce Pearson. Bruce is an Artist whose paintings embed hidden text within complex, fractal forms.

In our collaboration, the Text is constructed as an 8’ high steel spiral in the landscape. You walk a dynamic double spiral path and the experience is activated, simultaneously, by reading, and being embedded within, a text. In addition, the text itself – is embedded within a system of fractal shapes and the fractals have an equivalent importance to the text.

Movement through the piece is active through the dynamic shape of the walk ; the fractal form of Bruce’s art; and the text itself.

The spiral is in contrast to the horizontal, static nature of a Line, demonstrated by another project I will return to: Bridge - Studio. In this case a Linear Wood Frame building is a linear bridge, used as a writing and painting studio. The concept was to fabricate a Line or Plane in landscape.

A line is ‘zero’ - because it has no thickness - but is also Infinite – because it extends in both directions without end.

11/25/2014

Silence is the base condition for Sound Urbanism and Sound Ecology. Sound Urbanism // Sound Ecology is the title of a course taught by Victoria Meyers architect in 2012 - 2013 at the University of Cincinnati's Graduate School of Architecture. Above: hMa's (Victoria Meyers architect) Won Buddhist Retreat, where the Meditation Hall was developed as an enclave of silence. This was achieved both through the site planning and landscape design (by hMa), and also by attention placed on sound-proofing in the building, in collaboration with Jaffe Holden Acoustics.

Silence is also featured in the works of John Cage, and Sarah von Sonsbeeck, above. Silence was a major aspect of the semester's studies, and included reviews of Cage's 4' - 33", Cage's monograph, 'Silence', above; Paley Park in NYC, designed by landscape architects Zion and Breen, which notably is not quiet, but filled with the sound of water, drowning out the sounds of New York City; and, more recently, the works of Dutch artist, Sarah von Sonsbeeck, including her piece, featured above, 'one square meter of broken silence'.

11/22/2014

Victoria Meyers and her new book Shape of Sound are featured in a new post on Life.Style.Design. The Art of Living. Check out the post: http://www.lifestyledesignexperience.com/shape-of-sound/.

The post includes texts from Meyers's 2014 Shape of Sound, as well as her 2006 book, Designing with Light.

Designing with Light, Victoria Meyers architect

The piece describes Meyers as a visionary exploring sound as a medium to expand contemporary space design. Meyers has been at the forefront of using sound in hMa projects, since 2006, with the installation of 'Sound and Light Wells' in hMa's Infinity Chapel, located near Washington Square in the Greenwich Village area of New York City.

Meyers' latest foray into complex architectural design incorporating sound includes hMa's DWi-P located at Battery Park City, in NYC. DWi-P features a 550-foot long glass facade with embedded blue-tooth technology to support visitors reading the facade using cell phones. The facade is imprinted with a sound-score by NYC Composer Michael J. Schumacher, who is also the Founder and Executive Director of Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn.

DWi-P is a new Community Center at Battery Park City designed to welcome visitors from the World Trade Center Memorial Site to the parks at Battery Park City. The building, which houses a series of pools to support the swimming programs of Asphalt Green, has a composition embedded in the facade titled: WaTER.

Meyers recently presented hMa's works at FIU (Florida International University) in Miami, where she was hosted by Professor David Rifkind. Meyers's lecture, titled SEMPER (system, energy, materiality, program, education, research) reviewed hMa's works, including the founding principals' (Meyers and Hanrahan) dedication to education as part of their approach to design, architecture, landscapes, and master plans.

08/28/2014

Victoria Meyers architect, hanrahan Meyers architects, presents shade, shadow and form, related to the firm's works at Won Buddhist Retreat, DWi-P, and the works of Iannis Xenakis.

Above: Porch at Won Buddhist Retreat, hMa, 2014: Cedar Screen design based on variable spacing - to reflect the wooded condition of the site: Infinite Bleed of Edge

Above: La Tourette Windows : Window Patterning based on Iannis Xenakis sound composition, and geometric ideas formulated in the Modulor, with Le Corbusier. These forms were later transcribed into sound by Xenakis in his composition, Metastasis.

DWi-P by hMa, hanrahan Meyers architects. A frameless glass facade, where a frit pattern is generated by a sound score by New York composer Michael J. Schumacher: WaTER. To hear WaTER, visit the hMa website: www.hanrahanMeyers.com.

Above: Water, by Karen Gunderson.

Meyers explores themes linking Water, lines, form, shadow, and light in her new book, Shape of Sound available here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=victoria%20meyers%20shape%20of%20sound

12/05/2013

hMa and Victoria Meyers architect are pleased to announce that Victoria Meyers is the 2013 - 2014 David Niland Chair, at the University of Cincinnati School of Architecture. To read more about the appointment, see: http://daap.uc.edu/alumni/newsletter/newsArchive/MeyersBio.html.

During her appointment, Meyers presented a new course: Sound Urbanism / Sound Ecology. The course is in support of her upcoming book with Artifice Books: Shape of Sound.

To read more about Victoria Meyers, and sound urbanism, view Meyers' profile at Academia.edu: https://uc.academia.edu/VictoriaMeyers.

Currently Meyers is working on a House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, based on a house by Richard Neutra. The house includes a stone base, with a light weight steel frame structure, and concrete and glass walls emerging, above.

Currently Meyers is working from her office in Los Angeles. Her firm, hMa, has offices in New York City, and Los Angeles.

11/03/2013

A house in nature should recognize and respect the presence of that landscape.A retreat in nature should allow the silence of the forest to enter into the domestic realm.The choice of site is the most important decision for placing a house within any landscape.

There is a fundamental relationship between the perception of sculpture and the presence of the human body.Sculptors think with their bodies and sense their presence in the world.The world-space is the raw material in which the sculptor inscribes the human presence.

The minimalists and the process artists have tempered our views of what defines sculpture.Their emphatic use of unaccustomed spaces such as floors, ceilings, fields, and even water and volcanoes (in the case of Turrell) has brought the surveyor’s view of the world into the art of sculpture.

Landscape

Land has so much potential

The scale of American nature was grander than anything that the Europeans who settled it had ever experienced.A house in nature should recognize and respect the presence of that landscape.A retreat in nature should allow the silence of the forest to enter into the domestic realm.The choice of site is the most important decision for placing a house within such a landscape:interior space can acknowledge and enhance one’s sense of the landscape without.

Plumb Run:Equal Elevations

Richard Serra, 1983

hMa's practice is based on the fundamentals of architecture:light, space, and materials.In 2002 we published a monograph of our work:the four states of architecture, a bookdivided into four sections that address this approach to the fundamentals of architecture:horizon, light, atmospheres, and ground.The four states of architecture is a reference to our attempt to weave interpretations of the natural world through our projects.Our projects range in scale from individual residences to buildings for institutional clients, galleries, and performing arts.In 2006 designing with light was published by Laurence King, documenting Victoria Meyers and hMa’s research into light.Designing with light was the first in a series of books mapping Victoria’s research into natural phenomena.Future publications include shape of sound (Spring 2014); and atmospheres.

In 2006 we completed Holley House in Garrison, New York.Holley House rests on two stone landscape walls that grow out of the ground plane.The two walls define an interior space.To either side of this ‘three-dimensional wall’, pavilions project into the landscape. The house is designed as an atmosphere of nature:an ancient stone wall in the landscape becomes a centering device for dwelling.Dwelling occurs in wall-less pavilions that project out from this central wall.

07/19/2013

For the past twenty years, I have crafted an architectural and urban design practice (hanrahan Meyers architects) that includes sound as a formal element of the designed environment. Music is the art of sound, and architecture is the art of building. Shape of Sound is an attempt to catalogue the cross-fertilization between sound and architecture, and how these two disciplines unite to generate a unique hybrid practice.

I began using sound as part of my architectural practice in 1995, when I developed a concept for a museum installation titled Sampling. Sampling was proposed to the San Francisco Museum of Art, and included works by sound artistsStephen Vitiello and DJ Olive; visual artists Bruce Pearson and Roxy Paine; and works from hMa, my architectural practice. Contemporary art, architecture, and sound are deeply concerned with sampling and samples. Contemporary architects, visual artists, and sound artists use ‘samples’ as operative tools to create post-modern representations of contemporary culture.

Since 2002 I have collaborated with the composer and sound artist Michael Schumacher (www.michaeljschumacher.com). You can see Michael’s work if you look at the cover of this book. My firm, hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) commissioned Michael to develop a score for our building, DWi-P (Digital Water i-Pavilion), and we etched Michael’s score for his composition (WaTER) onto the building’s glass façade. You can hear Michael’s score through the DWi-P App, or by visiting the SoS web page: www.shapeofsound.us.

Sound is a mechanical wave that translates from our ears to our brains as sound. It may seem curious that someone who works in the highly visual media of architecture and urban design would develop a body of work that uses sound - an invisible energy wave - as a focal point. When architectural form is used to frame a phenomenon, and renders it, in this case, sound, ‘visible’: a visceral link is created between the spaces that we occupy, and our experience of the world.

I met Stephen Vitiello, whose piece, ‘A Bell for Every Minute’, animated the High Line project in New York City, when Stephen and I worked on the ‘Sampling’ show. We have continued our dialogue about the effects of sound in the environment ever since. You can see Stephen’s work, which is critical to this book, in the chapters on Sound Urbanism (pages 80 – 81), and Sound Art (pages 117 – 123).

hMa also collaborated with sound artist Jane Philbrick on an architectural and sound installation for Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. Vox Harbour was a spoken word installation in a waterfront park that included the construction of three ‘listening and speaking’ stations. The stations were wood shells designed by hMa to capture sound within naturalistic, bio-morphically shaped ‘talking’ booths. The booths were designed for users to stand in and speak (single users). Words were recorded and overlaid by words spoken by prior participants. The concept was to capture multiple recordings representing the broad cultural heritage of Queens.

Shape of Sound and Designing with Light: a series connection

Prior to Shape of Sound, I published Designing with Light in 2006. DwL included research on light by Dr. Lene Hau, from Harvard’s Physics Department; sound works by composers Arvo Part and John Cage; videos by artist Bill Viola; and light art by Dan Flavin. All of these practitioners had developed artistic and scientific works that were, on the one hand, relevant to their particular media, but also, at the same time, addressed to the issue of how light affects space.

Shape of Sound was planned to follow the methods of inquiry set forth by DwL. Architecture is an art where all of the senses are engaged. SoS is a book that looks at sound as an objective, formal element of design, using methods of critique and investigation, similar to the critical methods used to study light in DwL.

Perception and Sound Waves

Our perception of the sounds that we hear changes over time, and is directly related to the contemporary technologies of any given place and/or time. The sound of a Medieval village was very different from the sound of a town with factories during the industrial era. Our contemporary sound perception of the city is highly displaced through the on-going dialogue that smart phone users hear through their headsets.

The sound of the city today is more of a hum than the grinding of factories from the industrial age, but we also have cars everywhere, and airplanes overhead. There are a lot of sounds, in addition to the sounds of nature. SoS is an attempt to isolate and critically evaluate many of those sounds, and make them a conscious part of the design discussion about the city and the building.

Contemporary experience of Sound

Our contemporary sense of sound is conditioned by digital technologies. The generation coming of age grew up listening to the world through headphones. This generation hears the world differently than prior generations, and part of what this book looks at is this very difference. hMa explores that difference in particular in our recently completed DWi-P project (Digital Water i-Pavilion) at Battery Park City.

Walls are a traditional element of the language of architecture. Columns and walls are the basic language of architecture taught in the first year of architectural design studies. Our perception of walls changes radically, however, if they become ‘green screens’ for the projection of imagery and sound. This book begins to touch on recent digital innovations, as we move toward intelligent walls that respond to human interactions assisted through biologic and electronic sensory systems. The emergence of intelligent systems, manifest in interactive electronic and biological interfaces that interact with building users, is changing the experience of our physical environment.

The object of our interaction with the built environment is no longer the materiality of walls and surfaces. The critical focus of architecture and urban design is becoming the continuous and interactive surface of web-based information.

Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier, and the Phillips Pavilion : Precursors of where we are today

The work of structural engineer and composer Iannis Xenakis, composer Edgar Varese, and architect Le Corbusier at the Phillips Pavilion has been a strong influence on contemporary design. As architecture faces the rapidity of contemporary technological advancements, I would reference readers to the Phillips Pavilion, which was, in its day, a prescient and futuristic example of the sort of interactive wall surfaces that we are beginning to see constructed in public spaces today.

Singularity

We face a singular moment in history. Architecture is searching for new points of reference as a response to the disintegration of its material form through the sensory experiences of the Internet and digital media. My idea with Shape of Sound was to explore this edge, and to comment on where we stand today, with respect to these various and differential forms of media and knowledge as they interact with and alter our perception of the physical world.

Books by hMa

Victoria Meyers: Designing With Light
New York Architects Victoria Meyers and Thomas Hanrahan believe that architecture is an environment, 'pure space', manifested in nature. The principals of hanrahanMeyers architects (hMa) have established themselves as unique visionaries, incorporating light and sound into their arresting designs of pure forms. Founded in 1987, the firm specializes in residences, art centers, and community spaces. They design spaces from a vision that connects visitors with the natural world.
www.designingwithlight.us

The Conservation FundAs part of our nature based vision for architecture, hMa gives a percentage of the firm’s annual revenues to nature initiatives. This year, hMa funded ‘Wildlife Corridors’, through the Conservation Fund. ‘Wildlife Corridors’ provide natural zones through cities and towns that link animals with adjacent nature preserves. This initiative is one of several cutting-edge planning initiatives that forward thinking architects will be adopting as we seek to harmonize human habitats with nature and create sustainable development.